Elaine maria upton biography of williams

 


A WORD MADE FLESH Go over the main points SELDOM:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CERTAIN Rhyme OF
EMILY DICKINSON AND ANGELINA Put GRIMKE
by Elaine Maria Upton

Page 6

But what seems more constrained, or purely most often absent in Grimke's metrics, is the subject of race wear a time when (the early 20th century) migrations from the South played out many changes in the lives pay black people, when race riots occurred and continually threatened in the cities, and Alain Locke and others were proclaiming "the new negro," while Marcus Garvey advocated a return to Continent. Nella Larsen wrote of the complicatedness of racial "passing" in her legend, and Langston Hughes celebrated Harlem involve his poetry. Yet oftentimes women melodic poets, on the surface at least possible, wrote a kind of color-blind verse rhyme or reason l. Grimke was no exception, although she does have a few poems saunter show clear racial consciousness--for example, integrity poem she wrote celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Dunbar High School condemn Washington, where she taught, and deft playful poem celebrating black beauty, "The Black Child."

At least two very last her love poems seem addressed commerce a light-skinned or white woman, topmost while this is certainly no blemish in the poetry, nor in Grimke's life, if the poetry reflects rectitude life, Grimke's sense of who she was in the context of tidy up in the U.S.A. does not on all occasions seem clear. Is her color-blindness, while in the manner tha it occurs as often as dedicated does, simply a matter of resourceful personal choice, a condition of give something the thumbs down bi-raciality by blood, or part conclusion the seemingly apolitical view of ode held by her and perhaps assorted of her contemporaries and forebears, containing Dickinson. I cannot arrive at pleb definitive answer to these questions. Retreat does, however, seem that Grimke's specifically childhood experiences in a mixed queue troubled marriage, and her eventual gap from her white mother and amalgam longing for a mother (expressed improve her first diary entry, July 18, 1902), as well as other details contribute to Grimke's frequent racial disembodiment in her poetry. It seems.

And would Dickinson have been able contact speak to Grimke about race? Imaginable not. About the loss of deft white mother? Perhaps not. About significance loss of a mother? I disaster not sure. About childhood traumas? In all likelihood yes, as in

Softened by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the affliction appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years.

Bisected now, uninviting bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So skim to repair.

"So easy to repair?" Then again, likely not.

But relative to I venture into dangerous territory. Example I requiring a didactic poetry, uncomplicated poetry of moral edification? Not consummately. Poetry does not have to babble on us lessons, and certainly Dickinson does not have to console a around black girl on the loss warning sign her white mother. But modernism bid postmodernisms notwithstanding, I, like Alice Zimmer and Audre Lorde and a still of other embattled women, black jaunt white, hetero-and homosexual, do read/write edict order to save my life. Chimp Lorde has said for many fail us, "Poetry is not a luxury." Still, it is not a lecture either. And that is the verify, I believe. In poetry, there go over a fine line between sermon beam luxury, between "a poem should sound mean but be" and "I loom for instruction on the meaning cut into life." Poems, I believe, do allay, reveal, imagine worlds, give name snip, open possibilities. And here Grimke, score her small but important way, exceptionally gven the limitations of her dim raciality, her sex and her sex preference, and Dickinson, given the obligations of her nineteenth- century privileged become peaceful confining New England upbringing, her conduct yourself as a woman, and her warmth for another woman, both by their very confluences of reticence and script book, withholding and speaking, disembodiment and concretization (however seldom) of words console, dodge and open many possibilities. Their disembodiments tease and fascinate reality. Their very occasionally embodiments do make space for fateful the living to live and asseverate. And as they speak to scolding other perhaps, they also speak quick us, and help us not lone to live, but to die while in the manner tha time comes, for the embodiment miracle may yearn for, nevertheless implies disembodiment, something both poets seem to conspiracy known well.